Mark L. Stout Consulting is an all-purpose transportation consulting firm, specializing in finance, program management, and legislative and DOT policy. Our company has served public agencies and non-profits, big and small, all across the nation. Mark is widely-recognized as an expert whose years of experience can help organizations to break through gridlock and deliver transformative projects and innovative community enhancements.

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Congrats to Bruce Speight, WISPIRG, and the Coalition for
More Responsible Transportation for going nose to nose with Wisconsin DOT over
the agency’s proposed widening of I-94 in Milwaukee.It’s a bad project, out of touch with the times and the
place, and deserves to be replaced by something better.

My role has been to offer a real alternative for the
something better: “The Rehab/Transit Option: A Better Solution for Milwaukee’s
East-West Corridor.”The Coalition
formally launched the option at a City Hall press conference today (links to
the press release, the full report, and a map of the transit plan all available
on WISPIRG’s website here).
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel story, with video, slide show, and link to paper here.

The two pieces of the proposal are pretty straightforward.The Rehab part would replace WisDOT’s
unnecessary widening with a rehabilitation project.The Draft Environmental Impact Statement actually concedes
that most of the infrastructure, safety, and operational issues on the highway
can be addressed through a rehab option.The Transit piece proposes a new, high-quality, rapid transit system in
the corridor that would provide long-term, sustainable mobility, much more in
keeping with the needs of a 21st-century city.At this stage of the game, the transit
plan is very much conceptual, with detailed planning and engineering stages
needed.But hopefully the concept
plan will show Milwaukee and southeast Wisconsin citizens how major origins and
destinations can be better linked by a modern transit system than by an 8-lane
(in some places 10-lane) urban freeway!

Monday, December 1, 2014

Alas, those of us who struggle to reignite a sense of
purpose and optimism in this country, and especially those of us in the
transportation field, took another hit recently with the announcement of the
end of the Columbia Pike Streetcar project in Arlington, VA (story here).County leaders took stock after the
re-election of an anti-streetcar member of the county board (his initial
election to the board in a special election was considered a fluke – my story
here) and threw in the towel.

This was a real setback for smart growth advocates.Arlington is the poster child for
transit-oriented development – at least in the Northeast – and Columbia Pike
looked to be an ideal setting for a streetcar that would promote transit,
leverage sustainable economic development, and enhance the region’s investment
in the Metro system (to which the streetcar would link).

No doubt the streetcar project had issues, being big and
complex, and expensive, and perhaps just too heavy a lift for a small
jurisdiction (227,000 people). And
when it comes to funding projects like this, the federal government is nowhere
to be found, doling out money to only a handful of projects around the
country.At this rate, it will
take us a century or more to build the projects that we ought to put in the
ground in one generation.